Topic: Fairbrix fiasco (Read 3615 times)

It is still running, serving like BBQcoin used to as a nice quiet low difficulty chain where people who do not have GPUs can pick up coins month after month using their CPUs.

Tenebrix is also still serving that same purpose.

BBQcoin no longer serves that purpose because after a good long run - a year or so maybe, maybe a little more or less - of CPU mining the GPU miners "re-discovered" it and drove its difficulty too high for CPU miners, it went to the exchanges (which alone would have brought it to the GPU miners' attention) and now the CPU miners who mined it all those months get to cash out on it while continuing to quietly CPU-mine Fairbrix and Tenebrix.

-MarkM-

I don't think so as this coin is considered dead or almost dead.. But it's still possible to connect to FBX network

is there somewhere a stats page for FBX?

Well, I'm interested in doing this for Fairbrix. I don't think the community would hate this. With a new currency, you only send coins to the exchanges anyways. So it's not unreasonable for the exchange's view of the chain to be the "right" one in order to prevent an attacker from screwing over the exchange. I'm sure we can come up with things to limit what the exchange can do.

Here are some possible bad things the exchange can do:
- Run its own miners and only accept blocks produce by its miners, thereby reaping all the mined coins
- Do a double spend against its own users. After a user withdraws FBX, the exchange can lock in an different block and reverse that pay out
- Totally kill the chain by locking in a bad block

Somethings we can do is to have the ability to undo a lock. Maybe a kill switch for this block locking functionality. And if the exchange really misbehaves, people will stop using it, and I can always release a new client without this code.

Well, I suspect that the community would treat actual deployment of God-Emperor Exchange even less warmly than it treats large "future development/exotic laundry" premines.

Though I think that Ixcoin could do that with relatively little public relations issues... Maybe we should propose that to the fakepanese guy ?

My idea doesn't cover multiple exchanges. It would only work with one. More thought would be needed to extend it to other exchanges if needed. This is what I meant by centralizing around the exchange. So for the 'one true exchange' idea I'd see one order book managing deposits, withdraws and orders. This is the entity doing the checkpointing. Perhaps other 'exchanges' use an API to access the order book and provide functionality on top.

From the top of my graphic-designery meatbrains (so likely a very measly attack), let's consider a situation with 2 exchanges (not implausible), one of which is under attacker's influence (knowingly or not).

Exchange 1 "blesses" block No X on "legit" chain

Exchange 2 transmits a blessing for same block number ("X"), but on a chain synthesized by the attacker.

Attacker then "reveals" his blockchain, and it is "longer" (in the "sum of work" sense, of course)

How does system respond ?

You declared the improper forking. You are coordinating a "better release" that everyone will be required to adopt. I'm not sure which fork your release blesses, but your team got to make that decision. As Larry Lessig is fond of saying, "Code is Law".

That is all I mean by center of the universe.

I am not the center of the Fairbrix universe in any way that I'm aware of.

Understandably, from the point of view of *coins as crypto-anarchist currencies, this would seem initially distasteful.

However, it is important to note that it *never* makes sense for two different exchanges to trade on different forks. They will always have to take a break from trading to determine which is the correct fork to continue trading on.

Otherwise, forking effectively doubles the number of coins in existence. Bitcoin hoarders pray for that to happen. It never will. Imagine if the chain forked and Euros traded on one branch and Dollars on the other. I could sell my pre-fork coins once for Dollars and again for Euros. Woot!

Not going to happen.

So the reality is, if you chose to continue the fork without the exchanges. You are in the same boat. You have just create a new currency pre-distributed to everyone who also owned *coins before the fork. That is just bad business. You would deserve what you get.

If an exchange got hacked and tried to fork the chain, all the other exchanges would notice, stop, and gather together to repeat the above exercise. Most likely the hacked exchange would be forced back to the consensus branch and be required to repair any client damage. Otherwise they would be bankrupted and sued.

It is an ironic fact, that even in crypto-anarchist currencies, there is a center of the universe. For Fairbrix at this moment, it is michaelmclees. Later it will be the exchanges.

I'd like to see merged mining in both GPU and CPU chains. You don't have to trust anybody and your hash rate goes through the roof. It will mess with the exchange rates but that will get ironed out in the end.

I really see merged mining as a win win.

It would need to work like the current "certificate storage" in the web browsers. You would put the "public key" for the exchange that holds your coins into your client. If they get hacked you could read about it in the news and remove the key manually, without having to wait for the developer to change anything.

The main obstracle is that this would be a rather complex piece of software, with nontrivial effort required to develop it. But I think this will need to be developed sooner or later, probably as an offshot of libbitcoin.

Right, there are problems to resolve. But this is for the specific case of low hash rate chains. It's trust the central authority to provide lockins or have coins stolen by block chain rewriters.

I think that is a very bad idea. Why should I trust exchange operators? Because they are in business and hold coins? That doesn't qualify them to control an aspect of a crypto coin. Which exchange operators would we trust? What if the exchange got hacked and the key stolen? A thief would know who to target to get the key and exchanges are already juicy targets. What if an exchange is sold? Then the buyer(s) gets to do what they want with the chain?

No thank you sir.

I mean no offence by this.

I don't see how an exchange sending out a signed transaction containing a checkpoint to nodes is any different from a coin creator regularly updating the client with a checkpoint and asking for clients to upgrade. The advantage with the former is it's automatic and nodes upgrade automatically.

I am far from being a Real Programmer, but I have a sort of hunch that various "dynamic lockins" (be they timestamp-based or "magical transaction" based) could open a rather large can of net-scale DoS worms.

Just a bellyfeel, unsupported with code or evidence.

Right, this is what happened. If you want to centralize around the exchange one thought I posted in another thread is have the exchange broadcast to the network the checkpoint for blocks when it confirms a deposit to the exchange database. Nodes then accept this message as a 'lockin' checkpoint. Expanding this to multiple exchanges might be wanted but in the 'one true exchange' case it'd work.

well, first the guy got the bitcoins and THEN revealed his longer chain that invalidated the older spends

so it doesn't help

LOL!  New meme for me. Woot!

It's not so much "discuss among ourselves" as "A girl in Brazil is reorging the blockchain! SHUT ! DOWN ! EVERYTHING !!!"